NICE, France: French police have taken into custody a man who broke into a museum in southern France overnight and threatened to turn it into “hell,” provoking a four-hour standoff, authorities said Wednesday.
Police and a bomb disposal squad surrounded the archeology museum in the Mediterranean town of Saint-Raphael and police were searching the site in case he had an accomplice, the top regional official said.
One of the messages reads “the museum is going to become a hell,” the source said, without specifying if the man was armed or if other people were in the building.
Earlier, in a Twitter message police warned people to avoid the area in the historic center of the resort town tucked between Cannes and Saint-Tropez.
“The entire neighborhood is locked down... We’ve been ordered to stay in the restaurant,” Sebastian, an employee at the Duplex restaurant opposite the museum, told the local Nice-Matin newspaper.
The museum, a historic monument, includes a medieval stone church and a vast collection of amphoras and other items from the region’s Roman history.
Man detained after museum standoff in southern France
Man detained after museum standoff in southern France
California joins UN health network following US departure from WHO
- California Governor Gavin Newsom decried the United States’ move on Friday, calling it a “reckless decision” that will hurt many people
CALIFORNIA: California said on Friday it will become the first US state to join the World Health Organization’s global outbreak response network following the Trump administration’s decision to pull Washington out of the WHO.
The network, comprised of more than 360 technical institutions, responds to public health events with the deployment of staff and resources to affected countries. It has tackled major public health events, including COVID-19. The state’s decision to join the network comes more than a year after US President Donald Trump gave notice that Washington would depart from the WHO. On Thursday, it officially withdrew from the agency, saying its decision reflected failures in the UN health agency’s management of the pandemic.
California Governor Gavin Newsom decried the United States’ move on Friday, calling it a “reckless decision” that will hurt many people.
“California will not bear witness to the chaos this decision will bring,” Newsom said in a statement. “We will continue to foster partnerships across the globe and remain at the forefront of public health preparedness, including through our membership as the only state in WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert & Response Network.”
The governor’s office said he met with the WHO’s Director General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week, where they discussed collaborating to detect and respond to emerging public health threats.
The WHO did not immediately respond when reached for comment.
